Memories and writing tips

Chin up pet

I find it difficult to work well (effectively, I suppose) without certain things. Most of these are simple: a tidy desk, an ordered folder system within my computer or laptop, a quiet and calm environment, etc. Thankfully these are not an issue for the most part. Harder though, are the activities that have been eroded by long term illness. If I wanted to be more productive and was getting bogged down under the weight of work, I knew a good walk would sort me out, or maybe going out with friends. Even (and this is pretty sad I know) blitzing the house until it was sparkling would get my head into the space it needed in order to really feel like I was getting the best out of myself again. These are now largely unavailable to me (without getting significantly worse for a long period of time in any case) and so I’m trying to find different, if more sedentary ways, to fire myself up. I suppose the fact my brain is seeking non-academic activities and outlets is a sign that things aren’t quite as bad as they were, maybe. I can but hope.

A memory: a café in Bavaria

I’ve never been one for sitting still but it occurred to me recently that many of my most vivid memories involve not doing much at all, with my favourite person (or people).

It’s September and after a week of beautiful weather, our penultimate day in Germany is soggy and freezing cold. The sudden change is a miserable shock to the system and as soon as we arrive in the little town of Füssen down the road from where we’ve been staying, we’re looking for somewhere to hide from the elements. Unfortunately, so is everyone else. We pile into a very ordinary and not particularly cute café where we’d sat and had breakfast outside a few mornings prior. It’s rammed, everyone huddled around cups of coffee, coats dripping from backs of chairs onto the tiled floor. I scout a two person table next to a coat rack and throw myself into a seat before anyone else can claim it. The service people are polite and efficient but obviously incredibly stretched given this sudden influx of people, so our order (coffee and cake) takes a long while. It doesn’t matter, we have nowhere in particular to be and for that moment it’s enough to be there, sat in an unremarkable café surrounded by people who are chuntering away good-naturedly in a language I can only understand fragments of.

So many vibrant and evocative memories involve food and drink. I wonder if the almost ritualistic act of eating and drinking, alongside everyone else even while they’re also separate from us, creates within us a similar experience to when we sit down to eat with a group of friends. A communal connection that crystalises a moment, even if we’re mostly unaware of it at the time.

A writing tip: post-it notes

I’ve done some training classes lately via True North (who are wonderful) and I’m not, of course, going to pilfer their classes and duplicate that here. What I thought might be useful though is if I posted some small things I’ve found helpful in my approaches to writing, from recently but also methods I’ve used through my career.

The first is post-it notes. Pretty obvious one really. The super sticky ones are best because you can remove and re-stick them without them peeling away from the page and fluttering to the ground like a Victorian with a touch of the vapours. I like to write ideas for sections or chapters onto them and then stick them to a large piece of thick brown paper. Being able to see something tangible and move it around to restructure is very helpful to me. Better than writing them in a Word document and pasting sections into different places.

A memory: shooting stars

It is time for the Perseid meteor shower and the forecast is CLEAR SKIES(!) We drive to the darkest, highest spot we can think of away from other people with similar ideas, and park up. We angle ourselves awkwardly until our heads are hanging out of our respective open windows, and stare upward. Our heads get cold and our necks hurt, we see nothing. We are persistent though, a brief break then new angles, chosen to accommodate discomfort, and, gasp, I see a tiny bright light ping a trail across the night sky. The Man spots one too and then we’re treated to a handful of little zings against the dark blue of the summer sky; the first time I’ve ever seen shooting stars.

A writing tip: freewriting

I’d heard of freewriting before and I know a lot of people do it, but I’d, truthfully, been a little eye-rolly about it until it was an exercise in recent training (thanks True North!) and hey, it worked. For me, anyway. Paper and pen is a nicer way to do it than typing, I’ve found, but just pick a subject or prompt and write faster than you can think. The idea is to stop you overthinking and to loosen up your thoughts so that you might unstick yourself from your mind glue! This really freed up my mind. I’d been working on a piece for uni and kept finding myself completely stuck and frustrated, really having to eke out every single word. Doing some freewriting around that topic made me think of some new questions I’d not thought about previously, and some sub-topics that I’d not yet looked into. I haven’t tried it for other types of writing yet but imagine it works just as well for fiction as academia or non-fiction.

A memory: an unlikely charcuterie

We sit under the pavilion-like shelter of Halle aux Grains in Foix as the sun is dipping. The evening is now cool but that hasn’t stopped the tables filling up with a variety of locals having pre-dinner drinks: old guys chatting over beers, impossibly cool young people sipping glasses of wine. It’s a shame to leave but our drinks are done and we are hungry.

The tourists yearn for charcuterie and so I frantically Google food places nearby that might have one. Aha, success, at the top of the road does food and surely its name is a placeholder: No Name Restaurant. Using Maps we follow our electronic guide in the direction indicated until we reach the pin. This can’t be right. In front of us is a huge white stone building with a balcony and suspicious purple lighting glowing through the windows. We peek inside to see what looks like a large dancefloor with DJ decks set up at the far end. There are tables around the dancefloor and disco lights are moving, but the place is empty. Clearly there has been some mistake. The manager(?) pops out and we ask if they serve food. We’re enthusiastically told they do and shown to a table before we can politely escape. A waiter comes over and I ask for whatever dark beer he recommends (it turns out to be great), and we decide on a charcuterie - they do indeed have them and there are options! - to share, for about 25 euros. While we wait for food we sip our beers and watch another two couples enter the building in the exact way we did, confused and drawn in by internet recommendations. Music starts up, loud but more ‘this is funny isn’t it’ loud than annoying or uncomfortable. It quickly becomes apparent that for some reason the same handful of cover version dance songs are playing on a loop.

We question our decisions.

The charcuterie arrives and it is glorious; beyond all expectations of these two weary and fairly puzzled travellers.

Sadly I only thought to photograph it once we’d started on it, but my god it was enormous. It also came with a huge bowl of fries. We have not yet surpassed this ‘I fancy this particular thing, I get something that nails exactly what I want’ experience and we regularly hold this up as our god tier standard of charcuterie, even though I’ve made it look a bit less than appetising in the photo… sorry.

A writing tip: document and celebrate

Sometimes when we’re really in something it’s hard to see the progress we’ve made so far, or a possible path ahead. It can be quite nice to look back over work you’re stuck on or frustrated with, and see how far you’ve already come. Although I’d make copies, I had a tendency to edit and re-write over the same documents, but it actually becomes much harder to see your progress that way. I’m trying to get into better habits now by making a new version of my draft before I start making any changes, and to do that over each major pass. Again this might be obvious already to a lot of you but it’s something I didn’t really do before and I’ve found it useful.

Keeping little mementos to document your journey on a big project is good, too. Got the email that offered you your first published article/story/whatever? Great, screenshot it and pop it into a little folder. Get some press for something you did? Amazing, get it into that folder. When you’re feeling like you hate everything you’ve ever written and never want to write again, open up your little folder of success and remind yourself that it’s a marathon and not a sprint. You’ve done it before and you’ll do it again.

Chin up, pet

If you’re not local, ‘pet’ is a term of endearment around here, and ‘chin up’ I’m sure you already know, is a way of saying keep going even when things are tough. And that is what I’m trying to do, keep my chin up. To remind myself that there has been so much good, and there surely will be again.

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